§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising. In particular, the present invention concerns serving relevant, useful advertisements to users.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Web page-based ads (also referred to as “Web ads”) are often presented to their target audience in the form of “banner ads” (i.e., a rectangular box that includes graphic components), or as “sponsored link” ads in which a list of linked Web pages are provided. When a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the Specification without loss of generality) selects one of these ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to a Web page (which may be referred to as the “landing page” of the ad) of the advertiser's Website where they can be presented with marketing information, and/or consummate a transaction. A user selection of an ad is commonly referred to as a “clickthrough.” As used in the Specification, “Clickthrough” is intended to cover any user selection.
Some Web pages use various targeting techniques to present more relevant ads, and therefore more useful ads, to users. For example, the Google search engine processes a search query to generate search results pages. In addition to search results, these pages may include ads targeted to keywords of the search query. As another example, ads may be targeted to topics or concepts of the content of a Web page.
Regardless of whether or how ads are targeted, an advertiser typically compensates the content (e.g., Web page) owner (and perhaps an ad serving entity). Such compensation may occur whenever the ad is served (per impression), or may be subject to a condition precedent such as a selection, a conversion, etc. Compensation per selection (commonly referred to as “pay per click”) is currently becoming popular. For example, referring to FIG. 1, Web page 100 includes content 110, a first set of ads 120 in its right margin and a second set of ads 130 in its lower margin. When a user selects one of the ads of the first set 120, they are brought to (e.g., their browser loads) a corresponding ad landing page 140 linked from the ad 120. Similarly, when a user selects one of the ads of the second set 130, they are brought to a corresponding ad landing page 150 linked from the ad 130. The advertisers compensate the Web page owner for the selection, as indicated by the $ symbols.
Although services such as Google's AdSense™ have enabled advertisers to target ads to the topics or concepts of content on a Web page, some Web pages are fairly general (e.g., autos, careers, health) which makes it difficult to achieve high levels of ad performance, such as the levels of ad performance associated with ads targeted to Web pages having more specific concepts and topics. This is unfortunate because Web pages with more general content are often the most heavily visited (e.g., have the most “page views”).
Thus, it would be useful to help advertisers and content owners, such as Web page servers, to bring more useful, relevant ads to users, even in the case of Web pages with more general content.